COUNCILLORS: NOT CANUTES

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23052, 21 June 1940, Page 14

COUNCILLORS: NOT CANUTES

/TO THE ' EDITOR OF THE PRESS. Sir,—Part of your report of the New Brighton Borough Council meeting reads that Cr. J. N. Clarke, in reply to my complaint about the flooding in Estuary road south, suggested that there were “no Canutes on the council. ’ Historians have told us that King Canute, upon getting his feet wet, was persuaded to desist before he got into deeper water. If the courtiers of Cr. Clarke (as chairman of the reserves committee) had exercised as much sagacity as did the courtiers of Canute, the Brighton Borough Council would not have committed the stupid blunder of planting thousands of pines in the tide-flooding area now mentioned, only to leave them to drown because of the extensive gaps in the neglected stopbank. ' , More than that, the council would not have been so indiscreet as to engage men, for weeks, under the 13 scheme, cleaning up around the roots of these same dead trees. If the council had heeded an early-.warning about the neglected stopbank, neither the. trees- nor the residents’ gardens would have been drowned, and Cr. Clarke would easily have “saved his face.”— Yours, etc., GEO. DUNCAN. June 20, 1940.